Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st

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Were you starting to feel like Yahoo maybe hadn’t bought enough stuff this week? Surprise! Yahoo has just acquired Rockmelt, the social browsing startup.

According to a blog post on Rockmelt’s site, the Rockmelt apps and web product will be shutdown on August 31, 2013. Rockmelt is encouraging their users to export all of their data through each app’s built-in export button before that day comes.

Rockmelt began its life in 2010 as a browser with a social twist; it was essentially Chromium (the same open source engine that powers Chrome), with all sorts of social sharing stuff built in. You could easily share content with your friends over Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately for Rockmelt, most people seemed to prefer to share stuff over Twitter and Facebook … over Twitter and Facebook.

In April of 2011, the company shut down the browser to refocus as more of a content-aggregator. Their news app would present popular content from around the web and provide basic browsing functionally; it was sort of a weird mash-up of Flipboard and Digg and a light-weight browser. Alas, they never really found a massive audience — and those who did come, didn’t stay. Of the one million-or-so users who’d tried Rockmelt’s iOS App by June (many months after its launch), only 50% were ever coming back the next day.

No acquisition price was given, though AllThingsD reports that it came in somewhere between $60M and $70M.

Given that Yahoo is already planning to kill off Rockmelt’s wares right out of the gate, it’s safe to say that this one was very much a talent acquisition. (And given that the original blog post announcing the acquisition was quietly co-signed by Adam Cahan, Yahoo’s senior vice president of Mobile, it’s safe to say that it was largely a mobile talent acquisition.)

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OverviewYahoo is the world's largest start-up, which means that we move fast and always let our users lead the way. Founded in 1994 by two Stanford PhD candidates, we've grown into a company that helps you find what you're looking for on any Internet-connected device. Our employees are rewarded for curiosity and we celebrate explorers, relying on our passionate and transformative talent to do what's …

OverviewRockmelt is a social web browser built off of Chromium and boasts deep integration with both Facebook and Twitter with its "Edges" which are filled with friends that are online and feeds that you follow complete with update badges.
It also sports what some believe to be the next big search revolution. Unlike Google's universal navigation field, RockMelt has a dedicated search field that …